Right - and regex makes you think about function and variable names as strings, instead of as the higher level abstraction that an IDE with proper refactoring support lets you think. Regular expressions are not the right tool for that sort of work in 2018.

Look, I used to write web application in the 1990's with vim on computers with video cards that didn't have X drivers for them. I'm well versed in regular expressions, having used maybe a dozen flavors of them over the last 20 years. Being snooty about how useful regular expression should be (in your opinion) to the work of every other programmer out there isn't going to change the experiences of those others. I maintain that for web development there are quite often uses, but for scientific software (which is what I do), embedded, non-web based CRUD/LoB, and many other applications - it's just not what it used to be.

EDIT: turns out I was mixing up the tone of your comment with that of bmn__ down below so I replied more belligerent than your comment warrented - no offense, I'm just going to leave it up regardless.

No offense taken. But I'm not sure if this is objective or an another point of view. I do not think in terms of strings; with regex I actually describe what syntax my writing has and use that for conversion. Obviously, I cannot manage random mixed-style codes or entire grammar that way (though some flexibility exists). But for a homogeneous style it is pretty simple -- imo simpler than getting used to yet another IDE with its can and cannot-s.

Since I may use 2-3 [non-web] languages at the same time, viable IDE options may go down to zero. I like how regex and other vim-specific features empower my typing enough to not use what constrains me in my toolset.

I use a regular expression maybe a couple days out of the year; it seems they don't come up very often in real-time biomedical algorithms engineering. I'm sure most embedded programmers feel the same way.

All programmers' text editors include search/replace with regex and external filter commands (of which many of the often used are regex-enabled).

If the biomed or embedded programmer deliberately does not make use of that functionality, he is inefficient.

What if needing to search and replace in the first place is inefficient? Also, what if that engineer is female? Is he still inefficient?

I'm finding these comments hilarious. No true programmer!